After spending more than thirty years behind the lens—working for National Geographic, Time, Life, and Sports Illustrated—Joe McNally knows about light. He knows how to talk about it, shape it, color it, control it, and direct it. Most importantly, he knows how to create it...using small hot shoe flashes.
This is a great book, Joe is the best type of teacher, he can explain complicated ideas in a way that anybody can understand and in a funny manner. Plus, I have been a member of the 'Strobist' style of lighting for the past 2 years, I bought The Strobist DVDs from David Hobby, Joe's first book, and have followed both of their blogs (strobist.com and joemcnally.com/blog) I've been a professional photographer for a decade and really got myself into a rut, I told myself I mainly shoot 'available light' photography, but really I was just overwhelmed and underpaid to get into $10k worth of professional studio equipment. I shot some portrait work, but with the standard blah 'two lights at 45-degree angles' approach...it bored me and my subject. Joe's book (and the strobist idea) deals with using hot-shoe flashes the way that high-end photographers use expensive strobes. With today's digital cameras and wireless technology, you can now take several small flashes and set them up on light stands with modifiers such as umbrellas, grids, snoots, and gels to get pro results for a few hundred dollars (also check out DIY photography for modifiers you can make for next to nothing) . This is especially useful in location portraits when you're no where near an outlet to plug in the big strobes. Joe shoots with Nikon and uses their Creative Lighting System (which I also use and it's fantastic) but all the info he gives works with any camera brand. CLS lets you control the remote flashes from the camera so you can set up a few lights, start shooting and make adjustments without having to go back to each light. Like I said, I've been at this Strobist thing for a while, but I still got a lot out of this book, The beginning went over a lot of the rudimentary ideas but he get's crazy in the second half discussing all sorts of lighting set-ups with self-drawn set-ups to show you everything you need to recreate the shot except the phone number of the models.
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